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::OPINION On becoming a surveillance nation Thursday, April 10 2003 by Bernie Goldbach Send story to a friend Print this story Steady advances in camera technology, along with newly-expanded snooping by government agencies, have led to both Ireland and the United States becoming surveillance nations. While many people surf around for televised Gulf War reports, a new war is quietly consuming the landscape. It's the war on terrorism and its snipers are brutally assaulting individual liberties. Those who visited New York's annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP 2003) conference murmured about bad laws running roughshod over American liberty. Some attendees had fought battles for individual freedoms and personal privacy. They know things may never be as easy-going as before. As it's turned out, Americans value their security more than they value their anonymity. They're convinced that Homeland Security means constant vigilance against terrorism. Ordinary people have embraced the tools of surveillance. A quick browse of EarthCam.com shows ten different locations across Ireland that you can visit through CCTV and Webcams operating in public spaces. These cameras propagate because it is easy to buy and mount equipment like the Ninja Pan and Tilt Camera. The position of the lens can be remotely controlled through a Web browser. Take a rooftop tour of Dublin's city centre and you will see the tools of a surveillance society. Cameras poke out from corner crevices. Cybercafes record keystrokes of walk-in customers. The architecture of surveillance is being built by a loose alliance of government, private industry and voyeurs. The US government is throwing racks of computational power at its surveillance mission. Government snoops can dedicate an individual computer to each of the hundreds of individuals on watch lists. The computers churn through data, looking for bad tendencies. Asif Iqbal, a Rochester, New York, management consultant, must get FBI clearance every Monday and Thursday when he flies to and from Syracuse for business. Iqbal can't get off a government watch list because he shares the same name as a suspected terrorist. The flood of information comes from CAPPS II, a programme that scoops up and analyses data on everyone flying from Dublin to the US. Ordinary Irish citizens can now undergo background checks before landing in the US. Besides CAPPS II, the FBI is using the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, containing 39 million criminal records. As the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Web site explains, you can land in the NCIC database if someone steals your credit card and buys bomb-making material with it. The aviation list, intended to catch terrorists before they board planes, has persistently and widely snagged innocent American travellers, according to government documents obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The documents -- which include numerous e-mails, letters and call logs detailing the attempts of seemingly ordinary Americans to remove themselves from the list -- reveal that the lists are only getting longer. The United States has become the surveillance nation. It promulgates policies around the assumptions that government has the right to know absolutely everything about its people and that government can violate fundamental individual rights with impunity as long as the cause is deemed worthy. In the surveillance nation, individuals have no right to know what the government is doing with information. That is also the basic premise behind the Irish government's revision of the Freedom of Information Act. Recent changes make secrecy into a mantra, to be controlled without the scrutiny of the press or the electorate. It's rather unsettling to be living in a modern Irish society where the government would like to harvest electronic communications records of citizens while stifling freedom of information requests. We damage our way of life when we subvert liberty with layers of secrecy and when we permit the hand of government to hold onto reams of our personal electronic correspondence. We have no hope of being an entrepreneurial society if we abdicate our political freedoms to Big Brothers, public and private. As discussions at CFP 2003 indicate, little guys and their innocent Web server logs can be compromising individual liberties. Tens of thousands of logs, routinely kept by servers throughout the Internet, each marking every visit to a given Web site, identifying what pages were viewed, what transactions made and the Internet IP address of the visitor. Minister McDowell's data retention legislation will make it easier for the government to get server log entries. In civil proceedings, litigators often subpoena such logs for evidence. At the same time, it has become much easier to correlate data and to track down a user from their IP address. Last month, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University's Laboratory for International Data Privacy published a formal algorithm for identifying a Web surfer from pieces of information on different sites. These are troubling prospects to privacy advocates, at a time when ordinary citizens need to use the Web for things like medical information or personal finance, without the shadow of Big Brother behind them.